Holiday Buying Guide: What Tech Accessories Are Hot Right Now?

When buying a gadget as a gift, the answer won’t always be the iPhone.

Whether you’re tracking your fitness or trying to shoot a good photo, there’s a wide range of gadgets that aren’t just smartphones and tablets to accomplish that.

In fact, a lot of gadgets on the market right now make smartphones even more powerful by connecting to them and augmenting their abilities.

Here’s a run-down of a few extra tech accessories and gifts for the gadget enthusiast:

For the music junkie…

The Jawbone Jambox, an industrial-designed Bluetooth speaker that tethers to your smartphones, is one of the best mobile speakers on the market — and it’s small enough to fit in a purse or a small bag. You can set it running in a one-bedroom apartment and hear it basically throughout the apartment. The Jambox isn’t cheap — it starts at around $200 — but it’s well worth the investment.

For your home (or a gift recipient’s home), the Sonos wireless music system is about as good as it gets. You can control the speakers from an app on your mobile devices and it plays music from various streaming services like Spotify and Pandora. Again, the system isn’t cheap, starting at around $400, but it’s worth the price.

For the photography buff…

The cameras on smartphones are rapidly becoming about as good as those on semi-professional cameras, but sometimes it’s just not good enough. For that, there are a few substitutes.

ThePanasonic Lumix SZ7 is a very cheap ($130) point-and-shoot camera that’s a favorite at The Wirecutter. “Among its selling points, the camera offers a long zoom, good image stabilization, fast autofocus, 1080p video, a CMOS image sensor (which is very rare at this price) and solid image quality.”

For the more serious photographer, the Panasonic Lumix GF2 offers more flexibility with interchangeable lenses, and is well below the price of even budget DSLR cameras that are used for more professional-grade quality. The Lumix GF2 is going to run about $400.

Alternatively, you could buy your photography buff an iPhone 5 or a Nokia Lumia 920, both of which are equipped with cameras that perform well in low-light situations and are quickly becoming a good substitute for the traditional point-and-shoot camera.

Bloomberg

The Fitbit.

For the fitness guru…

For the casual, but still obsessed, fitness buff, theNike Fuelband offers a good way to keep track of your daily activity. It’ll run around $150 and essentially keeps track of how quickly and how far you move, distilling it down to a score called “fuel.” Realistically, the actual number doesn’t matter too much — just whether you hit a “goal” of strenuous or high physical activity for the day. The band doubles as a watch and a pedometer, too.

If you want to drill down even further, the Fitbit is a clip that will also track how well you are sleeping. It’s also cheaper than the Fuelband at about $100, but you’ll have to clip it to an article of clothing or carry the quarter-sized device around in your pocket. The Fuelband, by comparison, is worn like a bracelet.

For the TV viewer…

There are a couple options to augment your set-top profile.

The best go-to set-top replacement is probably the Xbox 360, because you can control it with both your voice and gestures using the Kinect motion controller. You can watch movies and television shows through apps like Netflix, and it has the added benefit of being a videogame console that can play a massive library of Xbox 360 games. The Xbox 360 with Kinect will run you north of $200, depending on which bundle you get.

Alternatively, the Apple TV is an easy-to-use interface for your television that will let you play movies, games and music on your TV through Airplay if you own any other Apple devices. It also makes it easy to purchase, rent and watch content from Apple’s iTunes store. The Apple TV is $99.

Various other goodies…

The Nest Thermostat is a great gift for the Apple-obsessed gadget-lover. It’s basically a high-tech thermostat that feels like a futuristic Apple device. You swap out your existing thermostat with this programmable thermostat that learns from your manual adjustments and builds a profile of the temperature you want in your house.

If you want a portable gaming device, theNintendo 3DSand PlayStation Vita are both decent choices — but only because they are compatible with the existing game line-up of their last-generation counterparts. The advantage the PlayStation Vita has is that you can download old PlayStation Portable games and behaves more like a smartphone, with email access and a few other goodies. Both consoles already have a lot of new, good games, but there isn’t enough there to justify purchasing the devices for their new games alone. The Nintendo 3DS will cost you about $170, while the Vita will cost around $250.